Looking for something?

Posts I Like

hair

When we found out we were pregnant, I thought it was time for all the urban legends I’d heard about pregnancy to be proven or not. Like how pregnancy brings on a craving for small green mangoes, grasshoppers out of season, edible clay and roast chicken in the middle of the night, from Namawojjolo on the Jinja-Kampala highway.

I have heard my own roast chicken story. The wife of a friend’s friend informed him one night that she desired roast chicken from the main street of Iganga. Apparently on a previous drive through Iganga, she had sampled the said chicken and so, in the dead of this night she was desirous of a repeat experience. The poor man drove to Iganga in the dead of night (thankfully they live in Jinja). When he recounted the tale to his drinking buddies the next day, they were beside themselves with laughter at his expense, as I probably would be. And then they set him straight. The baby was eight years old before he dared to confess to his wife that after that first time, whenever she sent him for Iganga chicken, he simply drove to his drinking joint, ordered a few drumsticks and had a beer or two. By the time he was done with his drink, the chicken had cooled enough to convince his wife that it had travelled the fifty or so kilometres from Iganga to Jinja.

My wife heard that story with me, so there will be no deceiving her when she sends for chicken. That must be why her desires have taken on a form that can be seen and felt; she had me grow my hair into an Afro because she likes the texture of it. I am blessed with a good head, thanks to some distant Rwandese genes, and being pregnant suddenly turned my wife into a rabid fan. So it was out with the barber and in with the shampoo, comb and extra time in the shower. While she must have enjoyed playing with my curls, I did not relish the abundance of hair, either on my scalp or on my face. The itching of a scalp unaccustomed to the extra weight near drove me mad at night, so convinced was I that I had contracted some form of airborne lice. Thankfully, the whims of a pregnant woman are as transitory as the allegiances of a Kenyan politician so, after a lot of wheedling, bribery and outright bullying I was finally granted leave to take the hair off. So excited were my barber and I at our reunion that he, inadvertently, shaved my hairline back by a centimetre or two.